Desktop

Either of these would be a good choice for the N150. If I were making the choice it would be Manjaro LXQt, because I like (and trust) Manjaro, it is smaller overall, it has made a lot of the same choices I would make in packages, and it just feels a bit snappier overall on the N150. But other people might very well prefer LXLE because it is based on Ubuntu and they prefer the package selection. It’s all good.

Linus noted in the release announcement about 4.7-rc6, “I’d love to tell you that things are calming down, and we’re shrinking, but that would be a lie. It’s not like this is a huge rc, but it’s definitely bigger than the previous rc’s were. I don’t think that’s necessarily a big problem, it seems to be mostly timing – we’ve just happened to get merges from most subsystems (eg networking from Davem, and all of the usual device driver subsystems from Greg, not to mention the GPU updates and all the random other subsystem maintainers). But networking (both drivers and core) is the most noticeable part.”

Announced last year was Bcachefs as a new Linux file-system derived from Bcache that aims for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like features. Since doing some early Bcachefs benchmarks last August, we hadn’t heard much (anything?) from the project since.

It turns out Bcachefs is still being developed and its primary author, Kent Overstreet, continues to believe it can compete with the likes of Btrfs and ZFS as a next-generation Linux file-system.

Games

Today, July 3, 2016, Valve’s engineers have pushed a new build of the SteamOS 2.0 gaming operating system to the brewmaster_beta channel, patching a few issues reported by users since SteamOS 2.83 Beta.

SteamOS 2.84 Beta is here only five days from the release of SteamOS 2.83 Beta, which was based on the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” repositories and introduced the AMD Radeon AMD GPU-PRO RC2 and the latest long-lived Nvidia 367.27 graphics drivers with support for the Vulkan API.

So far, that’s worked out well. Because of the work of the Linux developers and the GNU team, I now use a free and open desktop system that in most ways surpasses anything the proprietary folks offer. This has benefited the enterprise too, with data centers across the world filled with Linux serverss, not solely because Linux is free to use, but because in most cases it gets the job done better and cheaper than proprietary server operating systems.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

We have come a long way since the first Li-f-e live media based on openSUSE was created, the current release is based on openSUSE Leap 42.1. Deployments by Indonesia’s education system is a shining example of openSUSE Education project’s accomplishment.

The openSUSE project has stopped producing live medias for Leap and also live-installer is dropped from live medias created for the Tumbleweed distribution. As Li-f-e is primarily a live distribution we would not be able to create any more medias without live-installer. So unless this situation changes we may not have Li-f-e based on Leap 42.2.

After the official part of oSC16 ended, we had a promising disussion about the (technical) future of the openSUSE wiki. If everything works out as planned, we’ll get some shiny new hardware hosted in Provo that is only used for openSUSE – and the most important thing is that we’ll have SSH access to it and can do whatever is needed without having to wait for the Provo admins.

World’s oldest Linux distribution Slackware 14.2 is finally available for download. This release brings along multiple changes on the fronts of stability and security. The update also brings the latest development tools, window managers, updated programs and desktop environments.

Red Hat Family

For Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat, we collaborate closely with Red Hat; we test the upstream OpenStack code as well as the open-sourced projects we leverage for our deployment, such as Ceph and Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director. This is done in a variety of ways, like sharing test cases upstream with the community via Tempest, creating and tracking bugs, and creating bug fixes upstream.

The partnership focuses in particular on the rollout of a new, open source Eclipse Foundation project that will address requirements ranging from connectivity and configuration to application lifecycle. The co-sponsored project, Eclipse Kapua, integrates with the existing Eclipse Kura project to provide IoT developers and end users with an open platform that boosts community-driven development and helps them keep away from expensive, proprietary lock-in.

Fedora

Javier Igea has been using Linux since he bought the first release of Red Hat from a book store. While he was working on his PhD in New York City, his adviser recommended that he switch from Windows to Linux. The reason for this was he was going to be doing serious numerical computations. When asked about his childhood heroes, he joked about being a little bit old. “Tarzan. Do people know about him?” He continued, “I guess I am a little old, I was born in the late 50’s.” Igea’s two favorite movies are Saving Private Ryan and Welcome to the Sticks. Javier also likes fishing for striped bass, which he describes as a strange event.

Every time a new Fedora release is available, the community organizes events around the world to celebrate. Those events are necessary because they help meeting other users, contributors and, of course, it’s an opportunity to talk about Fedora.

My first Haskell program, and the only software I’ve written that was inspired by living in a particular place, git-annex has received the lion’s share of my time for five years.

It was written just to solve my own problem, but in a general way, that turned out to be useful in lots of other situations. So over the first half a year or so, it started attracting some early adopters who made some very helpful suggestions.

Then I did the git-annex assistant kickstarter, and started blogging about each day I worked on it. Four years of funding and seven hundred and twenty one posts later, the git-annex devblog is still going. So, I won’t talk about technical details in this post, they’ve all been covered.

Derivatives

Approximately two months after the release of the first Test build for the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” operating system series, the project’s development team announced today the availability of the second Test build.

The Knoppix distribution goes back in time, to the era of text menus, to provide an interface for computer users who are blind.

[...]

The Knoppix Linux distribution has existed since November 2000. It quickly grew in popularity because it was one of the first live operating systems available; you could boot from a CD and use Linux without actually installing it. The disc itself could be your operating system, as long as you saved your data to a hard drive or to a network share. At the time this was a groundbreaking idea, and it still is, given the lack of any such paradigm for non-open source operating systems (even an OS that has since developed a live-like environment for maintenance doesn’t intend for you to use that boot disc as your OS).

Canonical’s Ubuntu is the most widely deployed Linux distribution for running web servers, and the most commonly used platform for organisations building and operating clouds based on the OpenStack framework.

Today, July 4, 2016, Canonical’s Zygmunt Krynicki has had the pleasure of announcing that the Snappy implementation for Ubuntu Linux has been updated to snapd 2.0.10.

snapd 2.0.10 comes two weeks after the release of the 2.0.9 version, which introduced full Snap confinement on the elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” operating system, among several other goodies. However, the most interesting part of today’s announcement for snapd 2.0.10 is that it also landed for Fedora 24 users in the COPR repository.

Key Linux developers such as Canonical are looking to phase out support for 32-bit processors, citing their increasing rarity and that the effort required to maintain 32-bit code would be better spent on new applications.

Flavours and Variants

After reporting that his RaspEX operating system for Raspberry Pi devices woks out of the box with the official Raspberry Pi Touch Display 7-inch monitor, Arne Exton now informs us about the availability of a new RaspEX build.

The folks at CompuLab have announced their latest Linux-friendly PC, the fitlet-RM. The Fitlet-RM is described as “the smallest PC for extreme conditions” and is fanless.

The Fitlet-RM is the successor to the previously-reviewed Fitlet we tested last year. The Fitlet-RM is said to improve heat dissipation by 40% through a redesign of the all-metal housing. The new design is also said to be more rugged, and support a wider temperature range.

Did you know you can adorn your Raspberry Pi with HATs? Of course we’re not talking about hats like people put on their heads, but rather HATs: “hardware attached on top”. These are add-on circuit boards and accessories that add functionality to your Raspberry Pi.

In a clever bit of miniaturization, [JediJeremy] has nearly completed a gyro-mouse controller for a Raspberry Pi Zero! Ultimately this will be a wearable Linux-watch but along the way he had some fun with the interface.

The old way was to spend a lot of money on limited software and hardware. The new way, as PayPal’s Bill Scott, VP of next gen commerce found, is to scale out with lots of low-cost hardware and software. Open-source enables this, and to marvelously good effect.

Scott, a firm believer in lean engineering, stands by the fact that it’s the secret sauce that fosters innovation and efficacy.

Lean engineering, simply put, is becoming a part of the experimentation and learning cycle. The idea is to have rapid iteration and get feedback from customers quickly.

When it comes to chat, you have many choices. Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, Whatsapp, Kik, and Slack are all viable options. However, all of these choices are proprietary, and require you to use servers that you can’t run yourself. They’re highly centralized, closed source tools.

In the open source world, IRC has been the go to solution for chat for many years, and for good reason. Anyone can run a server, there’s many clients, and it’s built on open standards. But IRC comes from a pre-mobile world, and relies on clients to maintain persistent connections to the server. It’s not the best experience on a phone.

The Linux kernel was born twenty-five years ago this summer. Since that time a thriving partner ecosystem has arisen around open source platforms built on Linux, GNU and other free and open source software products. Here’s a look at milestones in the evolution of the Linux channel and partner ecosystem.

“Is he getting better, or is he dying?” asked my nephew of me. How to explain? The hospital sent me home three months ago with boxes of pain killers, oxygen, a medical bed, and home care. Palliative care: aim for quality of life, not return to normal. And yet here I am, not on oxygen, not taking the pain killers, and seeing medical staff only when it’s time for my biweekly chemotherapy.

I’m clearly not dying yet. And still, slowly losing weight and muscle. A simple walk leaves me tired and needing to sit. I wake up, make an early morning cup of chicory/coffee, drink it, then lie down again, hit by the simple effort of standing up.

We did a CAT scan a few weeks ago. Inconclusive. Things don’t seem worse. Yet the numerous little blobs of cancer are still there in my lungs, patient. Another scan in a month, and we’ll have a better idea.

CMS

Arastta eCommerce is an open source project which is driven by its community. For a relatively new startup project Arastta has a great community sharing ideas, translating into different world languages, reporting issues and bugs, contributing the source code and helping to plan the future of the project.

Public Services/Government

National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has begun training for 3,700 corps members on open source software development programme aimed at developing and empowering fresh graduate with Information Technology skills.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Blockchain-based online gaming and wagering platform Peerplays, has created an open-source fee sharing module that will enable direct profit distribution to token holders by any Graphene-based blockchain platform.

Open Hardware/Modding

…if you are interested in creating your own 3D printed robots using a little Arduino programming, open source coding or making in general. You might be interested in some new 3D printed open source robot projects which have been published to the Revolver website for all skill levels.

Science

Does your morning routine consist of checking emails, browsing Facebook, downing coffee, heading to the train while Googling one last idea, checking notifications, more coffee, and going through your work email? The very myriad of activities crammed into your morning, and the constant switching between them, is likely making you very tired.

Security

A file upload library used in Apache Tomcat and various Linux distributions needs patching to plug a denial-of-service vulnerability.

Discovered by the TERASOLUNA Framework Development Team, the bug in libcommons-fileupload-java, which sits under Apache Commons FileUpload, has the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures designation CVE-2016-3092.

Apache explains the bug here: “It occurred when the length of the multipart boundary was just below the size of the buffer (4096 bytes) used to read the uploaded file. This caused the file upload process to take several orders of magnitude longer than if the boundary length was the typical tens of bytes.”

Security officials searched on Sunday for evidence and the possible masterminds of the weekend hostage-taking in an upscale restaurant in Bangladesh’s capital. The government has denied a claim by ISIS that it carried out the attack that left 28 dead, including six attackers two police officers and 20 of the hostages.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

A new national newspaper is being launched in Britain, which will aim to “give voice to those dismayed by Brexit”.

The New European will be published by Archant on 8 July, and will cost £2. The publisher describes it as a “pop-up” paper, which took just nine days to get into newsagents after being conceived. It will initially run for just four issues, with any further print runs to be decided by reader interest.

In a statement Archant said: “Every issue will be a collector’s item. After the Issue 4, every week’s sale will be a referendum on the next.”

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in the last eight days at which Britain’s politics became officially more absurd than America’s. Last week’s Brexit vote, shocking as it was, was just the starting gun. Since then both the Labour and the Conservative party leaderships have collapsed. The “Leave” campaign has swiftly backtracked (paywall) on its promises. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, after enduring a stunning no-confidence vote, appeared to compare Israel with the Islamic State. The Conservatives’ Boris Johnson, the cheerleader of Leave and presumed next prime minister, bowed out after being stabbed in the back by his own sidekick, Michael Gove. And a leaked letter from Gove’s wife exposed the Tory party’s leading figures as little more than the puppets of media barons.

Let’s step back and deal with this the way that I am paid to do, with scenario and metaphor. Almost a decade before I wrote The Transparent Society, my novel EARTH (1989) foresaw a traumatic event occurring around the year 2025. The “Helvetian War” would start to unfold when a dozen newly-democratic but poor nations grow tired of asking politely for the return of trillions of dollars that were looted from them by former, kleptocratic leaders. The war scenario may be fictional, but the cassus belli is all-too real.

“Global Financial Integrity recently found that developing economies lost $7.8 trillion in cash from 2004 to 2013 because of maneuvers like those allegedly perfected by Mossack. Illicit outflows are increasing at a rate of 6.5% a year, twice the rate of global GDP growth,” says Time Magazine journalist Rana Foroohar, adding that this drain might prove a contributing factor to the slowing economies of many developing countries, which could set off a global recession.

“If Republicans are going to keep calling states ‘laboratories of democracy,’ they have to start looking at the results from the lab,” Maher said, noting that after California raised taxes on the wealthy, the state now sits sixth on the list of world’s largest economies. “Whereas states like Kansas and Louisiana that went back to the old trickle-down theory of ‘cut taxes on the rich and they’ll always do the right thing,’ are financial catastrophes.”

Maher explained that, after former-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger left office, California elected Democrats up and down the ballot, “so we can really study what happens when liberal policies are tried unimpeded. And the only thing I have to say to Republicans about that is: scoreboard, bitches.”

Britain is paying the price for a high level of inequality and a chronic lack of investment in education which have prompted a disillusioned population to vote to leave the European Union, Credit Suisse Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam said on Sunday.

Britain voted in a referendum on June 23 to quit the EU, a decision that has roiled financial markets and rattled businesses.

The established order in any society can sometimes be wrong-footed, but they are usually not wrong-footed for long. Genuine revolutionaries know this, and they act quickly to take full advantage of any temporary advantage. Soon, however, the established order will regroup and refocus, with renewed determination.

The generally pro-EU political class in the United Kingdom has certainly had a fright. They were not expecting to lose the EU referendum. British political leaders were so confident of victory they even casually said that the people’s decision would be implemented “straight away”. And now there is a crisis, but only for a while.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

I wasn’t ignorant. I knew the atrocities of the past, knew Jews were still targets of many, but I never experienced it. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta. There were three to five Jewish kids in all of my public school classes, so not only did I never experience Anti-Semitism, but I also never experienced the unsettling feeling of being “the other.”

Censorship/Free Speech

Biosemiotics pioneer Kalevi Kull has sent the following letter to me in response to one of the organizers of the upcoming Royal Society public meeting on paradigm shift attempting to censor my coverage of the event.

China’s powerful internet censorship body has further tightened its grip on online news reports by warning all news or social network websites against publishing news without proper verification, state media reports.

China’s powerful internet tsar steps aside as another of Xi Jinping’s close allies to take over

The instruction, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organisation, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese internet affairs.

To fire journalists for covering a protest because there’s a rule that says they can’t cover protests is ridiculous. To fire people for complaining about these policies is also ridiculous. I’m really angry at the SABC and at the same time have so much respect for the journalists working there who are speaking out against these practices.

Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (IRU) celebrated its first birthday at the weekend, but civil liberties organisations are worried that it goes too far in its efforts to keep the Web free from extremist propaganda.

The IRU has been up and running since July 2015 as part of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) in the Hague. The unit is charged with monitoring the Internet for extremist propaganda and referring “relevant online content towards concerned Internet service providers” in particular social media. Much was made of how the IRU could “contact social network service provider Facebook directly to ask it to delete a Web page run by ISIS or request details of other pages that might be run by the same user.”

Privacy/Surveillance

There are just 24 hours left to respond to a public consultation on the EU’s so-called Cookie Law. The European Commission plans an overhaul of the more correctly named ePrivacy Directive before the end of the year to bring it into line with the new General Data Protection Regulation.

The use of cookies in the UK is governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), based on the ePrivacy Directive, which require organisations to provide clear information about how cookies are used on their website and allow people to opt in or opt out from having non-essential cookies placed on their device.

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson caused a minor stir a couple weeks ago when he gave a speech at an advertising conference declaring that “No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.” He went on to say that while the Times is “not there yet,” the company may soon prevent users with ad blockers from accessing its site.

But newspaper executives like Thompson often focus exclusively on the drawbacks of ad blockers, leaving a big part of the story untold. Thompson did not say one word in his keynote address about the significant security benefits of ad blockers, which is ironic, because his paper was one of several news organizations that served its users ransomware—a particularly vicious form of malware that encrypts the contents of your computer and forces you to pay the perpetrators a ransom in bitcoin to unlock it—through its ad networks just a few months ago. Several major news sites—including the Times, the BBC, and AOL—had their ad networks hijacked by criminal hackers who attempted to install ransomware on readers’ computers.

Civil Rights/Policing

Few journalists know the cruelty of government censorship as well as James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, targeted for several major stories implicating criminality by the US war machine and its national security state.

Having just ended a seven-year legal battle, where he bravely faced jail time to protect his inside sources, Risen joins Abby Martin on The Empire Files to talk about his case and the stories he wrote that were such a threat.

The bodies of three Kenyan men— a human rights lawyer, his client, and their driver— were found in a river northeast of Nairobi last week, beaten, bound, and mutilated. Witnesses said one of the men had his eyes gouged out and another had an ear cut off.

The lawyer who was killed, Willie Kimani, worked with the US-based International Justice Mission. He and his client, Josephat Mwendwa, and driver Joseph Muiruriwho had been missing for over a week after attending a June 23 court hearing in Machakos County, near where their bodies were found. Mwendwa had filed a complaint against the police for shooting him without cause in April.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Ask consumers in the developed world about their household Wi-Fi connection and they’ll likely tell you that lately it seems to be getting worse, not better. Some might even say, “It stinks!” Even the residents of the White House have Wi-Fi problems. In an interview with the BBC just before Super Bowl 50, First Lady Michelle Obama complained, “It can be a little sketchy. The girls are just irritated by it.”

Intellectual Monopolies

In terms of sheer numbers, patents don’t play the biggest role; according to the 2015 numbers cited by the judge, almost 75% of the first-instance cases reviewed by the court dealt with trademarks, while a similar majority of second-instance cases were about copyright. Moreover, the vast majority of cases by number (90%) are administrative matters, including appeals from the Chinese Trademark Office’s Trademark Review and Adjucation Board (TRAB) and the State IP Office’s Patent Re-examination Board (PRB). But it was a patent-heavy cross-section of disputes that Judge Gang singled out with considerable enthusiasm:

The book proposes a “novel contractual framework for ‘Facilitating Transnational Exchanges of Genetic Resources within a Redesigned Microbial Research Infrastructure,’” and in particular the use of a standardized material transfer agreement “embodying a ‘take and pay rule’ that would enable unfettered public research uses of microbial materials having no known or likely commercial applications at the time of deposit in participating culture collections.”

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The ‘media coup’ of corporate giants (that claim to be 'friends') means that history of GNU/Linux is being distorted and lied about; it also explains prevalent lies such as "Microsoft loves Linux" and denial of GNU/Free software

A calm interpretation of the latest wave of lobbying from litigation professionals, i.e. people who profit when there are lots of patent disputes and even expensive lawsuits which may be totally frivolous (for example, based upon fake patents that aren't EPC-compliant)

Normalisation of invalid patents (granted by the EPO in defiance of the EPC) is a serious problem, but patent law firms continue to exploit that while this whole 'patent bubble' lasts (apparently the number of applications will continue to decrease because the perceived value of European Patents diminishes)

The ways Microsoft depresses GNU/Linux advocacy and discourages enthusiasm for Software Freedom is not hard to see; it's worth considering and understanding some of these tactics (mostly assimilation-centric and love-themed), which can otherwise go unnoticed

The openwashing services of the so-called 'Linux' Foundation are working; companies that are inherently against Open Source are being called "Open" and some people are willing to swallow this bait (so-called 'compromise' which is actually surrender to proprietary software regimes)

What good is the EPC when the EPO feels free to ignore it and nobody holds the EPO accountable for it? At the moment we're living in a post-EPC Europe where the only thing that counts is co-called 'products' (i.e. quantity, not quality).

The marketing agency that controls the name "Linux" is hardly showing any interest in technology or in journalism; it's just buying media coverage for sponsors and this is what it boils down to for the most part (at great expense)

Microsoft reminds us how E.E.E. tactics work; Microsoft is just hijacking its competition and misleading the market (claiming the competition to be its own, having "extended" it Microsoft's way with proprietary code)

As the Linux Foundation transitions into the Public Relations (PR) industry/domain we should accept if not expect Linux.com to become an extension of PR business models; the old Linux.com is long gone (all staff fired)

The Linux Foundation works for whoever pays the Linux Foundation and sadly that usually means companies that aren’t dedicated to Linux, to Software Freedom or even to simple truths and to the Rule of Law

The discussion about “Linux” is being saturated if not replaced by misinformation and marketing of Linux’s competition — owing largely to googlebombing tactics that the Linux Foundation participates in rather than tackle